They just literally
mow the mountains away, you know, the trees and everything… all
that was outlawed in California some years ago, and they still do it in Montana
and a few places.” (Eastwood quoted in “turnerclassicmovies.com”).[1]

It was outlawed
way back, even before ecological concerns were as prevalent as they are today.
So we play on that in the film. It’s kind of an ecological
statement. (Eastwood quoted in Frayling 135).

Instead of focusing
only on classic western conflicts, Clint Eastwood’s
1985 remake of Shane, Pale Rider highlights and critiques
the consequences of 1850s-1880’s corporate mining and, perhaps, its continued
repercussions into the 1980s. Unlike any other Eastwood Western, Pale Rider provides
its audience with a clear vision of the environmental horrors hydraulic mining
causes, even including a detailed description of the technique, while showing
the devastating results of a great engineering feat. Deep into the film, Josh
LaHood, the corporate miner’s son (Christopher Penn) explains how he
and his men are able to thrust 200 hundred pounds of pressure per square inch
of water at the side of a mountain, a process called hydraulic mining.

Josh LaHood describes the process to fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler,
a prospector’s daughter. His detailed description of this mining technique
engineered around 1850 is juxtaposed with images of falling trees and soil
devastated by the water shooting out of monitors, the water cannons used to
strip the hills of topsoil and growth to make the gold beneath easier to find.
According to Josh LaHood,

“About
three quarters of a mile upstream we diverted half of Cobalt Creek. See it
flows through a ditch along the contours of the slope and ends up about a
hundred yards up yonder….It flows into … a three foot pipe
and then flows down slope real steep. And then that narrows to a two-foot pipe.
And then a one foot pipe. You see all the time that water’s flowing downstream,
it picks up speed. And it picks up force by going into the thinner pipes….By
the time the water reaches the monitor, I’ve got about 200 pounds of
pressure per square inch. I can blast that gravel out of that cliff and then
it washes into the bed and then it travels right through the sluice.”

While looking
at the land around her, Megan tells Josh, “It looks like
hell.” But Josh is only interested in the product of the degradation: “You
know I can get 20 tons of gravel a day in this river,” he says. Seconds
later, while the audience watches hydraulic monitors shooting water at the
cliffs above the Yuba River, in an obvious parallel to what is happening to
the landscape, Josh attempts to rape Megan. Josh fails only because Preacher,
Clint Eastwood’s character, saves her.

This scene from Pale
Rider introduces one of its most important themes:
the exploitation of the environment and of those most connected to it. Although
this theme is prevalent mining films like How Green Was My Valley, it
is missing in any other Eastwood Western. In fact, Pale Rider is the
only film directed by Eastwood that focuses on such an issue. Pale Rider not
only examines how the environment can be exploited, it also takes the time
to demonstrate a better way, an alternative to the absolute destruction of
large scale corporate mining centered around the fact of hydraulic mining.
Just as Preacher saves Megan, the individual miners, “tin pans,” can
save the land from LaHood, the mining baron, and his environmentally devastating
methods.

Pale
Rider, however, not only problematizes corporate mining techniques,
suggesting that the corporation should be obliterated. It provides a viable
solution to the consequences of hydraulic mining—individual tin panning
in a cooperative community seeking to plant roots and raise families. In
contrast to LaHood and his greed for gold, for individual miners like Hull
Barret and Spider Conway, “Gold ain’t what [they’re] about” (Pale
Rider). But the film goes further, offering a political solution to
the environmental destruction threatened by hydraulic mining interests.

This solution in Pale Rider has not received any detailed examination.
Extreme violence is the ultimate solution offered in Pale Rider, and
while it is couched in mythological terms similar to High Plains Drifter,
the inclusion of Hull Barret in the mayhem and killing keeps the environmental
argument grounded in the here and now and provides for an alternative to the “progressive” model
of the Western, as defined by Richard Slotkin. Instead, the resolution of Pale
Rider harks back to The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) where, according
to Slotkin, Josie forgives his enemy with the claim,

“All of us died
a little in that damn war” (633).

It also prefigures
the anti-revenge themes in Eastwood’s critically acclaimed Unforgiven (1992)
and Mystic River (2003). Although violence does provide “regeneration” (Slotkin’s
word) in Pale Rider, it ultimately serves both a working class
community and the natural world that sustains it.

Brief
history of hydraulic mining

According to
Ken Huie, a park ranger in Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park,

“Hydraulic
mining was born and raised here in California….And
no matter what you think of the result, it was a tremendous engineering feat” (Keister).

Huie oversees
a park in the Sierra Nevada mountain range where the topography wears the
mark of hydraulic mining from the 1850s to the 1880s, a mining technique
so effective it was used in areas all over the western United States. According
to Edwin Kiester, Jr.,

“Hydraulic mining applied a simple method familiar
to all who’ve used a garden hose. Direct a forceful stream of water at
the earth, and it will carve a ditch and carry away loosened soil.”

To
create a large scale mining system,

“Engineers built a network of reservoirs,
lakes, ditches and flumes extending as far as 40 miles to catch every precious
drop of rain or Sierra snowmelt. Propelled by gravity along a vertical drop
of up to 500 feet, the captured waters converged into a single, powerful stream.
Then they were fed into water cannons trained on the gold-bearing hillside” (Kiester).

In Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, these cannons are on display.
Huie explains,

“A single monitor [water cannon] with an eight-inch nozzle
like this could direct 16,000 gallons of water a minute….It could tear
away 4000 cubic yards of earth from the hillside every day” (quoted in
Kiester).

And debris resulting
from such destructive mining was dumped into the Yuba river, so tainted water
flowed into the Feather River, the Sacramento and even San Francisco Bay
(Kiester). The Yuba River became so contaminated that

“The mine’s operator, North Bloomfield Gravel Mining, lost
a lawsuit in January 1884 for polluting the Yuba River with tailings that caused
massive floods in previous years” (Kiester).

It seems self-evident,
then, that hydraulic mining hurt not only the environment—the mountains bared
by water—but also the economic welfare of those flooded out by the dammed
rivers and streams.

In 1850, Edward
G. Buffum, a member of the Seventh Regiment of the New York State Volunteers
who spent six months in the gold mines, saw hydraulic mining as a way to
provide such economic development,

“to offer to the oppressed
and down-trodden of the whole world an asylum, and a place whereby honest industry,
which will contribute as much to our wealthy as their prosperity; they can
build themselves happy homes and live like freemen” (138).

According
to Buffum, hydraulic mining offered

“an immense field for the investment
of capital throughout the world, and for the employment of a large portion
of its labouring [sic] population” (141).

A frequent
binary:
“big guys against little guys” in Pale
Rider

Such an
attitude about nature, and about the environmental costs of mining, is also
reflected by films of the Western genre where mining, especially mining by
individuals, is romanticized and corporate mining like hydraulic mining is
denigrated only if it interferes with the economic progress of the individual
miner. Westerns like Badlanders (1958),The
Far Country (1955) and The Bend of the River (1952), however,
fail to examine environmental degradation accompanying corporate mining. Only
the corporate barons’ impact on the individual is called into question. Pale
Rider places environmental concerns at the forefront, with a corporate
baron agreeing with Buffum’s argument about hydraulic mining’s
potential and an avenging angel agreeing with the park ranger’s. The
binary is established between the evil LaHood and the good Preacher, but Hull
Barret and his community complicate and, perhaps, deconstruct the binary established
between LaHood and Preacher by offering an alternative to both.

The
opening to Pale Rider immediately establishes a classic binary between good
and evil found in Westerns like Shane, where cattle barons resist
the inclusion of small farmers into their open range, by contrasting the pristine
forested Sawtooth Mountains with the thunderous riders, who disrupt the peace
nature represents. Lennie Niehaus’s score heightens the threatening effect
of what we discover are LaHood’s men, who aim to invade the small miners’ village
and drive them out.

The pounding
of these riders is also contrasted with the laughter of the families in the
village where small miners carefully pan for gold in the clear water of a
stream. LaHood’s riders disturb the tranquility
of the small miners’ village, destroying homes as they tear through,
even going so far as to kill a cow and Megan’s pet dog. LaHood’s
riders clash with the small miners and the natural world represented by the
mountains, the stream and the village animals. But nature also serves as
the space in which the avenging Preacher is summoned, when Megan Wheeler
prays for a miracle over her dog’s grave. The first few minutes of
the film, then, set up good and evil elements in the film: the good stewards
of nature—Preacher
and the small miners—stand out against nature’s destroyers—LaHood
and his men.

Images
of the clear stream nurturing the small miners are reinforced by the quiet
tranquility, both visual and aural, of Carbon Canyon and by Hull Barret’s
attitude toward a large rock in the creek bed that he believes holds gold.
According to Barret, “If I could split that rock there, there’d
be gold underneath.” But in spite of his faith in the rock’s holdings,
Barret chooses not to blow up the rock because of the degradation it would
cause to the stream: “Well, I thought of drilling and blasting the son
of a gun, but you know, uh, that would…,” Barret begins. And Preacher
finishes his thought, “That would wreck the stream, wouldn’t it.” Barret
agrees, saying, “Yea, the stream would be dammed up….be the end
of everything.” Even though these small miners dig for gold, they refuse
to destroy the stream in order to attain it, choosing instead to sustain nature
so it can sustain them. In fact, the small miners continue gold panning instead
of evolving to more “productive” but destructive techniques common
in the 1850s like the two-man rocker, the two-man Long Tom or the sluice box
(“Hydraulic Mining in California”). According to Richard Schickel,

“These
peaceful souls are presented in the film almost as a hippie commune” (403).

Coy LaHood
and his men, on the other hand, strip the earth of all of its wealth. Juxtaposed
with scenes of Barret and Preacher hammering communally on the rock are images
of a train bringing LaHood back from Sacramento, where he had sought to obtain
control of the small miners’ claims. The discussion Coy LaHood has with
his son, Josh, and one of his gunmen, McGill, emphasizes their destructive
mining techniques and their greed for gold at any cost. The corporate miners
led by LaHood “play out” vein after vein of gold, in the “number
five shaft” and “down in Cobalt Canyon” (Pale Rider).
And, according to Josh LaHood, they “went another 20 foot down twelve
shaft and pulled out nothin’ but magnetite and shut her down.” After
excavating almost all of the gold on his own property, LaHood only wants more.

In a desperate
search for more gold, wealth, and complete control, LaHood not only sends
riders to intimidate the small miners and take over Carbon Canyon. He also
tries (and fails) to intimidate legislators in Sacramento to sign over the
small miners’ claims. According to Coy LaHood, “Sacramento
ain’t worth moose piss” because, legislators there “didn’t
sign the writ.” The scene does not stop with this blow to “the
big guys.” It also makes a blatant environmental statement
when Coy LaHood exclaims, “Some of those bastard politicians want to
do away with hydraulic mining altogether. Raping the land, they call it.” (See
Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land for further such examples.) Even
LaHood realizes the consequences of governmental intervention in his mining
business, but he responds from his own avaricious perspective:

“We’ve
gotta move on Carbon and move fast, ’cause
the way the wind’s blowin’, another couple of years, we may be
out of business.”

LaHood’s
greedy proclamations are contrasted with the small miners’ cooperative
stewardship of nature. After Preacher runs off Josh LaHood and his oversized
lackey, Club, Barret and Preacher, with the help of other community members,
finish splitting the big boulder on which they had been hammering, and later
on Barret discovers a large gold nugget beneath it. Such a scene in most Westerns
would provide the motivation for at least a spark of greed in the other miners,
so they would invade Barret’s rock in search for more gold. Instead,
Barret shows his nugget to Preacher, to Sarah, his fiancée, and to Megan,
her daughter and the four go to town to pay the community’s debts. The
other miners go on with their own mining efforts without much comment. Only
Spider’s sons respond, chasing the wagon and wishing they too could go
to town. The four ounce gold nugget inspires a family outing, communal responsibility
in the form of debt paying, and continued work, not greedy arguments and bloodshed.
Later in the film, Spider’s “payday come” (Barret).
He finds a gold-filled stone as big as his head. But the community again shows
no real emotional response, maintaining their labors but demonstrating no feelings
of greed. As Sarah puts it, it’s “his turn.” Spider and his
sons, just like Barret, celebrate by going to town, even though their stone
appears after LaHood dynamited the river and dammed up the communal stream.

The
communal trust the small miners have established becomes most evident when
they’re discussing the $1000.00 a claim LaHood offers them after a negotiation
in his office with Preacher, as a last effort to legally seize Carbon Canyon
before bringing in a gun-slinging mercenary and his deputies to kill Preacher
and run the small miners out. Hull Barret intervenes when it sounds like the
rest of the small miners wish to take the offer and avoid trouble:

“Startin
fresh sounds good when you’re in trouble. but before we, uh,
vote, uh, and pack up and leave, I think we oughta ask ourselves why we’re
here. ‘Cause if it’s no more than money, then we’re no
better than LaHood himself….If any of us turned up $1000.00 of nuggets,
would he quit? Hell no. He’d build his family a better house and,
uh, buy his kids better clothes. They’d build a school or a church.
If we were farmers we’d be planting crops. If we raised cattle, we’d
be tending them, but we’re miners, so we dig and pan, and break our
backs for gold, but gold ain’t what we’re about….I came
out here to raise a family. This is my home. This is my dream. I sunk roots
here.”

Barret and the
other small miners have built a community in Canyon Creek that they wish
to maintain, so they need to sustain the creek and canyon that nourish. Barret
sees small mining as a means to an end—building a family and a
community with schools and churches—not as a quest for gold, money, and
the power it represents.

Coy
LaHood, on the other hand, hauls out as much gold as possible as quickly
as he can for the money and power it provides. After failing to bribe Preacher
with a town church and a full collection plate, LaHood defines his own mission,
owning and controlling everything rather than joining a community of individuals
with agency:

“I opened
this country. I made this town what it is. I bought jobs and industry. I
built an empire with my own hands, and I’ve never asked help from anyone.
Those squatters, Reverend, are standing in the way of progress.”

For LaHood, the
land is meant to own and exploit, not to sustain for future family members:

“What’s mine’s
mine, and if you make me fight for it, I will.”

Coy LaHood sees
himself as representing progress, but it’s a destructive progress meant only for LaHood and his
followers. Individual miners who sustain the environment are standing in the
way of progress, are squatters who should be “run out” or paid
off, so the canyon can be stripped of all of its wealth without delay. In fact,
they must be destroyed, as Marshall Stockburn and his deputies destroy Spider
and his gold stone when Spider and his sons come to town to celebrate their
good luck.

Barret
and the small miners, then, are clearly established as law-abiding, ethical,
and community-minded (good) “little guys,” and Coy LaHood and his
followers counter them as evil corporate “big guys,” who take what
they want at any cost. This story, as Eastwood suggests, is nothing new for
Westerns. The environmental message the film nearly shouts out, however, sets Pale
Rider apart from all Eastwood directed films.

The film, then,
endorses both community values associated with the small miners and sustainable
development illustrated by their less invasive mining techniques. To do this,
it first argues strongly against extreme mining techniques associated with
a “fair
use” philosophy that justifies exploiting all natural resources on one’s
own property. LaHood and his men follow a fair use philosophy, taking extreme
measures to extract minerals quickly and without thought to maintaining the
land for future generations. As a testament against extreme environmental exploitation,
the film highlights the degradation caused by LaHood’s hydraulic mining
techniques with three focused scenes and two explanations of the process and
its results: one from Hull Barret and one already mentioned from Josh LaHood,
the mining baron’s son.

Images
of hydraulic mining:
a contemporary environmental message

The film’s
introduction to LaHood’s mining camp provides the first demonstration
of the consequences of hydraulic mining techniques. This scene shows viewers
the procedure without explanation, emphasizing the power of water pressure
coming from the hydraulic cannons (monitors). The scene begins with a long
shot of these powerful streams of water and then, a few shots later, shows
these torrents stripping the hillside of all life, with the blare of the rushing
water reverberating everywhere. The scene establishes a new setting—LaHood’s
camp—but it also illustrates both the amount of water pressure the procedure
creates and the environmental devastation this shooting water produces.

The visual
introduction to hydraulic mining is followed by the film’s first explanation
of the process, this time from the perspective of a small miner, Hull Barret
in a discussion with Preacher. According to Barret, “Coy LaHood came
up here in ’54 or ’55… [and was] the first man to strike
it rich.” Barret seems to have no objection to LaHood’s luck, but
Barret’s tone changes when he talks about LaHood’s current methods:

“Last
couple of years he’s been using them hydraulic monitors….blasts
the place to hell.”

Barret’s
description of the results of hydraulic mining are juxtaposed with images
of the clear stream where the small miners work less intrusively, a stark
contrast to the lifeless shots of the stripped hills in the previous scene.
Barret’s conversation with Preacher also
reveals the small miners’ legal right to Carbon Canyon, not LaHood’s.
Barret makes clear,

“The only way he can take this land legally is
if we leave it.”

The destruction
caused by LaHood’s mining methods
is introduced and explained thoroughly enough to reveal the film’s not
so subtle environmental message against extreme environmental exploitation,
a message heightened by LaHood’s greed for more land to exploit, ownership
of Carbon Canyon.

The second
scene showing viewers the effects of hydraulic mining occurs after the small
miners have voted to reject LaHood’s offer of $1000.00 per claim. When
Preacher rides into the hydraulic mining camp to pass the vote results on to
LaHood, the film shows even more of the destruction caused by pressurized water
shooting out of monitors. Instead of showing only soil stream off of the hillsides,
after a long shot of the water shooting cannons similar to those in the introductory
scene, the film lets us see trees falling off of the hillside along with the
eroding earth. The scene also reveals the first clear sign LaHood receives
from the small miners that his methods are failing. They reject
his offer. Environmental degradation in LaHood’s camp parallels the destruction
he causes after he learns about the small miners’ vote and blasts the
creek, damming it up. The film here shows us immediately how devastating one
blast can be, as the rippling creek dries up and narrows to one small stream
of water.

Figurative
and literal rape

The third and
arguably most powerful scene set in LaHood’s hydraulic
mining camp provides us with images of the shooting monitors and their devastating
consequences as well as a detailed explanation of the process, an engineering
feat highlighted by the noise of the pressurized water in the background, a
noise so loud Megan declares, “It hurts my ears.” Here the audience
watches the monitors from Megan’s point of view, since she has ridden
into camp and toward Josh LaHood to defy Preacher (who has rejected her love)
and her mother. Megan’s gaze aligns with her words: “It looks like
hell.” We have already recorded Josh’s description of the hydraulic
mining process, a description that highlights only the wealth it provides him
and his father.

But “raping the land,” as they called it in Sacramento,
is lined up with raping a woman—Megan—in this scene. The parallels
between the two “rapes” are underlined because LaHood’s men
leave their water cannons to watch the rape and cheer it on, just as they watched
the rape of the landscape caused by those same cannons. So when Preacher rescues
Megan by shooting first Josh’s gun and then his hand, the film shows
us what methods are needed to stop both the literal and the figurative rapes.

A solution
to “fair use”:
sustainable development and “monkey
wrench” violence

The small miners’ community and the environment it sustains cannot survive
unless Preacher and the small miners resort to force. These scenes, then, demonstrate
the film’s first environmental argument—that extreme methods like
hydraulic mining are too devastating to the environment and should be replaced
by the more gentle methods of the small miners, who seek to sustain their canyon
for future generations. But the film highlights the strength of the myth of
sustainable development as an alternative to fair use techniques like hydraulic
mining not only by illustrating the more positive results of panning in an
undammed stream; it also offers a viable (if violent) way to eliminate corporate
mining and the greedy baron controlling it.

Here the film
complicates the simple binary between good and evil prevalent in contemporary
Westerns: In order to save the land and their community, Eastwood and
the small miners’ representative, Hull Barret, must visit
on the corporation the same destruction as LaHood inflicted on the small miners
and the environment a difference from Shane, where Shane eliminates
Joe’s participation in a fistfight. After LaHood’s marshal and
his deputies mutilate Spider (who had gone to town only with his sons), Preacher
clarifies the small miners’ mission:

“A man alone is easy prey...
Only by standing together will you beat the LaHoods of the world.”

The next
morning when Preacher rides off to take on LaHood and his men alone, it seems
that he’s negating his claim about the need for community, but Barret
accompanies him, representing the communal spirit Preacher had forged. As stewards,
the small miners learn that they must protect themselves, their families, and
the environment using any means possible, including violence. Preacher is loaded
down with dynamite, so he and Barret are able to blow up LaHood’s mining
camp, the hydraulic mine’s cannons, and its infrastructure, returning
water to its source.

This last scene
of LaHood’s camp occurs at sunrise,
before the workers have risen, so the cannons lie dormant, and the remaining
hillside is uninjured. In this scene, no men are killed. They all escape
from the blasted tents and out-buildings, but the mining operation is destroyed
when Preacher and Barret finish their work. Since Preacher does not work
alone, it seems that the small miners and Preacher stand together to beat
LaHood until Barret picks up a stick of dynamite that Preacher drops, and Preacher
chases Barret’s
horse away. Preacher explains,

“You’re
a good man, Barret. You take care of Sarah and the girl.”

The suggestion
here is that Preacher will destroy the marshal, his deputies, and LaHood
without assistance, extracting the personal revenge to which the film has
alluded since Preacher’s arrival. Preacher has prepared for
his confrontation with Marshal Stockburn. When Preacher arrives in town, his
image seems to be superimposed on that of LaHood, since he is reflected in
the window out of which LaHood peers. And the marshal seems stunned when he
first recognizes Preacher and exclaims, “You!” It seems, then,
that Preacher will kill off LaHood and his men as a sole gunman, an avenging
angel seeking retribution for the wrongs Marshal Stockburn had committed.

Preacher easily
kills Stockburn’s deputies one by one in ghost style,
able to appear and disappear at will—demonstrating his supernatural status.
And he faces Marshal Stockburn in the street, in a showdown scene as old as
western films. It appears, then, that Preacher has taken on LaHood and his
gang without Barret and the community he represents. But after Preacher shoots
the marshal in the same six places in which he’d been shot—and
then one more time in the head—LaHood appears by his office window, this
time with a Winchester rifle in hand. We see him from Barret’s point
of view. Barret has arrived on foot, and he kills LaHood. In this way, LaHood
is killed by a human agent, Barret, the nominal leader of the sustainable community
who represents its values: the community can’t wait for the law to stop
something this destructive. The Preacher is now on his horse and, looking at
Barret, simply says with a smile, “Long walk.” Barret replies with
his own smile and a laconic, “Yep.”

Pale Rider, then,
argues for sustainable development as an alternative to extreme fair use
methods like hydraulic mining in several ways. It demonstrates that hydraulic
mining is wrong, moving beyond mere historical accuracy. It even shows us
that the government in Sacramento is against it, so that when Coy LaHood
tries to sway legislators and fails, he recognizes that he’ll
have to shut down his corporate mines in a couple of years. But when LaHood’s
reaction is to extract as much wealth as possible before he’s put out
of business, without thought to the environmental consequences, the film combines
the elements of Eastwood’s other Westerns with an environmental message.
A Preacher, called from nature, must implement vigilante justice to stop LaHood’s
desperate devastation of the environment. Such a clear and strong environmental
message deserves serious examination, especially since Eastwood “made
a point of discussing the environmental subtext of Pale Rider with
Todd McCarthy of Variety” ( McGilligan 377) at the Cannes Film
Festival where it was screened in 1985.

Thus like other western films, Pale Rider deals
with a contemporary set of political problems by placing it into a particular
past. In this case, Eastwood interrogates ecological devastation caused by
fair use politics by placing a symbol of the problem, hydraulic mining, in
its contemporary setting, the mid-1800s. And the film feeds off of the Man
With No Name persona and employs the revenge theme from other Eastwood Westerns.
A gun is also the best way to deal with political problems. Since the environment
will be destroyed before politics can legally stop it—there is no functioning legal system in
the town—it must be dealt with extra-legally through an avenging spirit
who comes literally from nature to protect the community and the environment
while gaining revenge on his murderers. Ultimately, Pale Rider makes
a contemporary environmental argument against fair use and for sustainable
development, an argument with continuing relevance in light of lawsuits in
Montana over open-pit mining and the aftereffects of hydraulic mining and other
destructive mining techniques like those using cyanide and arsenic to better
extract minerals.[2]

The end of Pale Rider reinforces this argument. After Preacher and
Barret destroy the corporate mining camp and kill off all its leaders, unlike High
Plains Drifter or Unforgiven, the Eastwood films to which Pale
Rider is most often compared, the focus is placed not only on Eastwood’s
Man With No Name—Preacher—but also on the representatives of the
small miners’ community—Barret and Megan. Preacher does not ride
off into a desolate desert after looking back on a town he had destroyed. Instead,
Preacher, a representative of the natural world, rides off into the Sawtooth
Mountains on his pale horse and disappears into the snow, a sign that he has
returned to the natural world from which he had been summoned. Barret and Megan,
on the other hand, ride back to their village, presumably prepared to build
the school and church for which they strive.

The last message
of the film centers on love and community, with Megan’s
declaration of love for Preacher and her proclamation that the whole community
loves him, too. The revenge cycle has been completed, and vigilante justice
has been achieved. Yet something new emerges in Pale Rider: a call
to action that serves not only violent ends but also environmental conservation.
When Barret kills LaHood, he also eradicates LaHood’s fair use politics
that destroy the environment that Barret and his community wish to sustain.

Notes

1. Montana
outlawed hydraulic mining in 1972. Montana’s 1972 Constitution provides
protection for the environment in Article IX, sections 1-4, especially. Section
1 states that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve
a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations” and
that “the legislature shall provide adequate remedies for protection
of the environmental life support system.” Section 2 centers on reclaiming “all
lands disturbed by the taking of natural resources,” and section 3
on water rights, where “the legislature shall provide for the administration,
control, and regulation of water rights,” so the amount of water required
by hydraulic mining techniques would be all but impossible to acquire. Section
4 focuses on preserving state lands for “use and enjoyment by the people.”

2. Time
Magazine ran an article on September 25, 1995 documenting the presence
of arsenic in old Montana and California mines. In Montana, Crown Butte
is attempting to mine for gold under protest, “in spite of Crown
Butte’s promise not to harm the area surrounding the mines in their
projected 10-15 year life-span.” One of their opponents, “Jim
Barrett, chairman of the anti-mine Beartooth Alliance” declared, “When
[the company] gets the gold, they’ll be gone, but we will be here
tomorrow. We will suffer forever.” However, the Crown Butte mining
project was on federal lands outside Montana’s control, and Crown
Butte mining, as of 2002, has failed to acquire these lands. Legal battles
are still in play regarding the use of cyanide to extract minerals in Montana,
as well.